Florida Couple Discusses Pain of Corvette Swallowed in Sinkhole

Think watching those Corvettes swallowed up at the National Corvette Museum is tough? Well, imagine if one of those irreplaceable babies was your own personal car.

Kevin and Linda Helmintoller can tell you exactly what it feels like. They owned the 2001 Corvette Z06 Mallet Hammer that fell the deepest into the sinkhole, and they drove 13 hours from Tampa, Florida to Bowling Green to check on the car.

“You could see three Corvettes literally vanish, and then that cut the power, and as that cut the power, one of those cameras was focused right on our car. So we said, ‘No, it didn’t happen.’ So we figure, power line was cut, someone ran in, stole it and drove off. So we’ll find it, and uh, no, that was not the case,” Kevin Helmintoller told WBKO news.

The Helmintollers donated the car to the museum around Thanksgiving and had yet to see it on display. Even worse, despite GM’s plans to restore all the cars, the Helmintollers aren’t sure their Corvette can be restored.

“It was heavily modified,” said Kevin. “It had a mallet conversion. It had an anti-venom conversion, so it was unique in that sense. You can’t really restore it to a stock condition.”

We certainly are keeping our fingers crossed for the Helmintollers to be able to get their baby back to its original form.